Friday, February 14, 2003

*... 'schmalentine's' ...*
Well, it's that time o' year: red and pink and hearts are everywhere you look. Time to bust out the chocolates and boxer shorts... boxer shorts?! Yeah, that and baking cakes are the #1 way to say "Be Mine". That's because only the women give gifts and dote on the men on this day over here. Although, on the surface, this practice is kind of annoying (hello, talk about being a simpering little woman!), I don't really mind this holiday. It just doesn't really register... I guess that's because technically I've never had what most people define as "a Valentine" (unless you count Troy Dowler, circa 1990, which I don't), and besides, anybody that could lay claim to the title of my Valentine this year (by traditional definition or not... and you know who you are... (at least I hope you do!)) is a good 5,000 miles away, so there ain't much lovin' (or cake bakin') going on there. So, ho hum, just another day, even if it still has me a little mystified about the whole one-way-edness of it, and especially since the confections are pretty impressive here (design-wise) and never in my life have I heard a man stop for a moment to admire, "My, what a pretty little chocolate!" But maybe I'm just not hanging around those chocolate-loving guys...?

On a related note, have you ever had a crush on one of your teachers? I know I did once when I was 16. (Come to think of it, I've had a crush on 2 of my teachers, although I would be more apt to call the second one "coach" and the first one "Mr. ___"... no, wait, I called him "coach" too, but he wasn't my coach... Actually, I think I called them both by their first names anyway, so it doesn't really matter.) Anyway, the point of all this is apparently there is a 'san-nen-sei' (3rd year student) who has a major crush on me, and everyone knows it (thanks to the fact that he wrote an essay on it (?!) and the teacher so generously shared it with the entire staff AND the student's homeroom class...) Problem is, I have no clue who this kid is. I have a name, and they all wear name tags, which of course are written in kanji so I can't read them. So this boy will remain anonymous, and I will ponder the striking similarity of situation to the "Asian boy from Cali" episode of 2000 (which ALSO doesn't count!!).
9:15 AM

Wednesday, February 12, 2003

*... too much information ...*
Faced with the (challenge? opportunity? excruciating task?) of sharing American sex education pedagogies with 3 Japanese educators (a principal, a nurse, and an interpretor : ), all of whom are at least 35 years older than I am, I would say that I now have a plethora of knowledge concerning the sexual behavior of junior high school kids in Japan. Just what I needed. However, I don't think they understood the part about my own sex education in junior high school being about 12 years ago, and thus, times (and lessons!) have changed. But seeing as I AM the voice of all that is American, I therefore became the leading authority on the subject. One welcome relief (to myself, and to a certain nervous person I know who feared implication should I say too much... LOL) was that they asked little about my own personal experiences, which is the first time I have witnessed any sense of respect for privacy with these 3 people especially. But that doesn't mean I didn't blush more than a few times, especially since my 'interpretor' apparently didn't do her homework, and was pointing out words and saying "what does this mean?" and I would have to explain the mechanics of certain ideas or, errr, umm, "actions" in as simple English as I could think of. Woo-Yeah, that's what I call cross-cultural understanding!

Turns out that (naturally) things like this are approached quite differently over here, almost passed over. They just crowd all the kids into a room and the PE teacher goes over basics. Like BASIC basic basics. They were quite shocked when I told them that State-side, we separate boys and girls for "the talk." They just couldn't understand why, and I guess that has a lot to do with how quite a different idea about human bodies and nakedness, etc are ingrained in them from birth compared to Western cultures. They started to throw culturally specific questions at me, such as "How do you (meaning America) address the problem of older men paying to have sex with young girls?" I hated to break it to them, but that was a pretty "Japanese" problem. I am not sure how much help I actually was, considering most of the problems they were posing were way beyond my scope of experience (like "are there places where junior high school students can go to have sex?" to which I replied "umm, I don't know...? If there are, I wasn't invited."). Most of all I emphasized the importance of parental influence, supervision, and discipline; the biggest deterrent factor I could find, but one that is not a popular way of living over here, unfortunately. And from that, these 3 teachers concluded that my parents must have done a good job since I was pretty much no help to their inquries whatsoever. So let me apologize to Japan for not being more whorish when I was 13. I blame my friends and parents. LOL.
9:05 AM